


Crush.

by darkershadeofbright



Category: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Age Difference, F/M, Roleplay, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:46:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27319462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkershadeofbright/pseuds/darkershadeofbright
Summary: Mary Russell is a university student, a grown woman, and a relative naif.  And Sherlock Holmes is nothing if not an object of interest.How do you grow into an independent, fully realized sexual being when you work for, sometimes even live with, your schoolgirl crush?Companion piece to "Unexpected," but stands alone
Relationships: Mary Russell/Original Male Character, Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell
Kudos: 8





	Crush.

The theatrical society auditions on a brisk Friday evening called to me, despite the veritable mountain of work I had waiting for me back in the dormitory. There was to be a comedy play directly before the Christmas holidays, and rehearsing would begin this week for all who were lucky enough (and avoidant of their schoolwork enough) to be cast. The topic of the play? The Great Sherlock Holmes. It was, in a word, irresistible.

  
I had done some acting the previous year, appearing in The Scarlet Pimpernel, singing badly in the chorus in a springtime revue, and taking a bit part in King Lear, which had opened just after final examinations for the year had finished, giving everyone something to look forward to. I had always found, in each of these adventures, that the compartmentalization of my time required in being part of an amateur theatrical exploit while simultaneously reading for my classes made me busier, more focused, and less likely to dawdle.

  
I thought of Holmes and his violin—had he begun to play as a way to keep himself sharp during his school days? That Sherlock Holmes, the most analytical and stoic of men, could take to something so creative, so beautiful, as the violin for a hobby struck others as odd, but to me it made perfect sense.

  
Indeed, as I waited in the recital hall on my turn to audition, a strong memory came to me unbidden.

I’d fallen asleep while reading before the fire in his Sussex Downs cottage a few months ago during the summer holiday, and woken up covered in a warm rug with a pillow under my head, two things I know I hadn’t had when I fell asleep. As I shook the rug off me, I noticed a scattering of cigarette ashes—the telltale sign that Holmes himself had been the one to tuck me in. And then I heard it—faint, stirring, but nonetheless audible over the gentle rocking of waves against the shore in the near distance. Holmes was tooling away again at his violin.

  
He often had done this—escaped in the night when he couldn’t sleep, walking out to the place where water met land in order to play his insomnia away. I think he only left the house to play when I was in residence—otherwise, he would have stayed on his own balcony. He tried not to wake me. Poor Mrs. Hudson, received no such consideration—but she also, I knew, slept like a rock, even during Holmes’ most experimental musical scratchings. I also knew, from talking to Mrs. Hudson, that it only worked sometimes, that often he was still bereft of sleep even after a long bout of playing the violin vigorously and improvisationally, coming in during the wee hours after playing, perspiration beading on his forehead, making himself a cup of tea and beginning with the business of his day, giving up the ghost of sleep. Perhaps, I imagined, he missed his former vices—the syringe, the tiny vial of cocaine solution stimulating him into an artificial wakefulness and transitory peace. Perhaps he wished he still lived in London, where the temptation to give in to that vice—or any number of others—was easier to indulge.

  
It was a warm summer night—a slight breeze only served to make it lovelier, the light from the gas lamps outside of the cottage illuminating the rustling of the rose bushes and the trees that lined the property. I decided to slip outside to listen to him better.

  
This night, Holmes was not playing an experimental tune, but rehashing an old favorite—a very old favorite. I knew that, no matter how much Holmes eschewed anything that smacked of sentimentalism, he had a secret love for the romantic ballads of his youth—especially the most maudlin of Irish love songs. More than once we had passed a street musician or an organ grinder playing such a song and, I could tell from the slight tightening at the corners of his eyes that he loved to hear them. He would never have stood for me pointing out such a thing—perhaps it would have made him feel like an old fool. So there was no way I would have gone and approached him now, as he pumped out the familiar, tragic notes of “The Rose of Tralee.”

  
Coming from the fingers of Sherlock Holmes, even such a song—sentimental as it was—was truly moving.

  
The full moon made it easy to spot him from the paddock near the house where I stood, my body obscured behind a tree, and I saw that he sat on a patch of grass, not far from the place where he had first stumbled upon me those years before. He wasn’t wearing much—his nightshirt, and a dressing gown hanging open. I saw that his hair was rumpled from tossing and turning. His posture was tired, maybe even defeated. The music was professionally executed, despite the rumpledness of the musician.  
He played through the song a couple of times, then set the violin down. He stood up. I made to go back inside the house before I was discovered, but noticed that he didn’t start walking home anyway. Instead, he slipped off his dressing gown, and then-before I could even get my druthers and avert my eyes—doffed his night shirt, too. I blinked several times. While my heart was busy trying to emerge through my throat, he arranged the clothing in a quick pile—no doubt to secure them from blowing away in the wind—and then strode into the sea, fully nude, and launched himself into some swimming exercises.

  
He had been far enough away from me that I hadn’t been able to make out anything specific—nothing that even the best of sketch artists could have drawn with any accuracy, shall we say—but it was, I knew, the first time I had ever seen a man completely naked. And I was self-aware enough that I felt I should take some time to reflect upon that, and how I felt about it.

  
Knowing that Holmes—the faint sound of whose breast strokes I could hear as he splashed in the Channel—was my superior, my “governor,” as they said, and certainly my elder, I decided to push all of that to one side for the moment. I took the opportunity of his distraction to race back into the house, thankful that I had remembered not to lock the door behind me, and hastily folded the rug he had covered me with, placing it on the settee, before scampering up to my room and closing the door. I turned on the small torch I kept by my bedside, opened the floral-covered leather journal Holmes had given me for Christmas last year, and picked up a pencil. Flipping to the back of the journal, to a page that was not covered in scribbles about the history of the ancient Hebrews, I wondered—what should I say? What are the key details that I must sort through?  
-I am eighteen, I wrote. I have been at Oxford for one year. I am Mary Russell—it is useless to pretend that I am not quite intelligent. My life has been spent with books. I have, heretofore, lacked experience in the arts of feminine…wiles? Seduction? Attraction? And I have only just now seen my first male…form.

  
And it belongs to Mr. Sherlock Holmes, of all people.

  
How did I feel?

  
It is useless to pretend, I continued, that I feel nothing for the male body. I have simply always assumed that the pleasures of the flesh, when shared with another, are not for such as me. I have experimented with the act of self-touch, to some success. And yet, the notion of finding a partner has been one I have pushed out of my mind, for reasons perhaps noble—I have other, more important things to do, and I don’t wish to be relegated to the position of simpering wife and mother—or perhaps self-deprecating—who would wish to partner with a too-thin, too-tall, and overly bookish someone like me, I ask myself in my darkest moments.

  
I thought of what I had seen, albeit from far away—a broad chest and shoulders, strong thighs, a buttocks that was not unshapely. A dark, mysterious thatch of hair and flesh at the apex of his legs, glimpsed too quickly to make a judgement about, but just enough that I was, perplexingly, curious. The same long arms, lined with muscles, I had often noted, which seemed to belong to a younger man. Perhaps (I realized, surprising myself) I got a better look than I realized.

  
Holmes would never in a million years have allowed me to see him in this way. He must have been completely certain that I was too exhausted to wake up in the near future when he placed the rug upon my sleeping form.

  
My heart thudding in my chest, I knew with absolute certainty that Holmes would expect me to be still soundly asleep on the floor by the fire when he came back inside. His reasoning would be based on the fact that he’d watched me consume not one but two glasses of wine with a hearty meal, and had commented himself on the fact that I was likely to fall asleep before my usual bedtime because of it. He must have slipped just past me on his way out, and there would be no way for him to miss the fact that I’d woken up once he came inside. I feared that he would know I had followed him outside, and seen him in his nakedness, if he came home and I was not where he’d left me. Sweeping the torch around the room for signs that I had been here in the bedroom, I smoothed the covers of the bed and crept downstairs. No sign of him yet—I arranged myself on the floor once again, on my side this time to indicate that I had shifted in my sleep, which would explain the changed placement of the rug, the pillow. My eyes had just closed when I heard his faint footsteps up the path.

  
It was no use. I couldn’t pretend to be asleep with him. He’d know.

  
He gently opened the door, and I allowed my eyes to flutter open. “Holmes!” I said, my voice shaky in a way that I hoped would indicate surprise rather than nerves.  
“Ah. Russell! You’re awake.” I sat up and took a look at him in the firelight. He had left off his nightshirt and held it in his hand, his robe tied around his waist, his bare chest and legs on display. I blinked very quickly and looked him in the eyes, putting on the flustered air of one just awakened.

  
“You startled me,” I replied. I made my voice husky, sleepy-sounding.

  
“My apologies. I was—I sometimes take a swim at night. It helps me clear my head,” he explained. He had used his nightshirt as a towel—I could see that it was damp. A light rivulet of water trickled down his temple, while another rolled down his neck and onto the sparse thicket of dark hair on his chest. That, I had not seen earlier. Something inside of me pulsed with an unfamiliar need, and my fingers twitched unbidden. He took a seat beside the dimming embers of the near-dead fire, arranging his robe carefully around himself.

“Forgive me for my lack of decorum,” he gestured at his partially dressed state. “I did not expect to find you awake.”

  
“You are in your own home,” I replied, smirking, proud of myself for not revealing anything to him. “If you surprised me by visiting my dormitory at Oxford unannounced, no doubt you’d find me in a similar state of undress or worse.”

  
His eyes never left the fire, but his jaw clenched, probably imperceptible to anyone but me. A moment passed, then another, before he quipped, “Remind me, then, to provide ample warning of my presence should I have need to pay you a call.” He smiled once at me, then returned his eyes to the fire. I thought of what I’d just said to him, and felt a slight blush forming, but he ignored it.

  
“Are you quite awake? It is nearly three in the morning. I assume you would like to take at least some rest in your own bed?”

  
“I…” I began, but then paused. How should I answer? I knew I needed sleep, yes, and also, I worried that the longer I spent in Holmes’ presence, the more likely it would be that I’d accidentally reveal what I’d seen tonight—or perhaps just as damaging to him, what I’d heard. The Great Sherlock Holmes indulging in maudlin ballads was just as damning as The Great Sherlock Holmes in flagrante, perhaps more so. And yet… “Are you up?”

  
“Yes,” he affirmed. “I think the night swim, rather than tiring me, refreshed me. I think I’ll dress and then go into the lab, perhaps continue my grass experiment. Would you care to join me?”

  
He was working on a way to determine, using chemical analysis, the composition of different variants of grass that grew in Sussex that had already been dried and desiccated, should a blade show up on the clothing or shoe of a long-deceased victim of crime. It was less pungent than many of his experiments, and it allowed me to stay sharp during the summer holiday while my chemistry program at Oxford was on hold until the autumn. I agreed, went upstairs and refreshed myself, and then brewed tea and joined him in the lab.

  
I don’t remember much of that morning, except the way we were able to bury ourselves in work together in a manner that felt peaceful and natural, like nothing else in my life ever did-- and the way Holmes dressed himself so impeccably, every button buttoned, every point of collar and fold of cuff precise and sharp-edged. It was such a contrast, I remember thinking, from the bare, glistening, gently muscled man I had seen for a moment an hour earlier, but who lived in my memory—who continued to live in my memory as many times as I tried to displace him in the intervening months.

As I glanced at the call for auditions in the Oxford paper, I wondered: what would the theatrical society want in a cast member for a Sherlock Holmes-based comedy play? I had nothing in my closet that resembled a Victorian maiden’s ensemble. All of my frocks and skirts were old-fashioned, yes, but none of them were the type of old-fashioned that would evoke the previous century, only the genteel poverty of someone who’d been wearing hand-me-downs and refurbished pieces from ten years previous. So I was not likely to be chosen as a likely damsel in distress, one of the many young, forlorn or desperate women who had trod up the staircase of 221B Baker Street at Mrs. Hudson’s behest, hoping against hope that the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes would give her aid when no one else could.

  
What I did have in my closet, though, was perhaps more interesting.

  
I dressed, left the dormitory, and made my way through a bevy of young hopefuls in bustled skirts, checked cloaks, and other Victoriana, and sat down in a chair, front and center in the auditorium. I saw Katherine Hanahan, an Irish heiress with a dramatic flair with whom I had partnered in a scene during the spring revue, done up in all the corseted glory of an 1890s barmaid. She raised her eyebrows at me and smirked. Timothy Jenkins, the brainy son of a barrister who was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps but who secretly longed to be a film actor, was dressed to the nines in a deerstalker cap, beige frock coat, and pipe hanging out of his mouth. He saw me, and the pipe fell out of his mouth; luckily, it was not full of tobacco and so nothing scattered on the floor except the pipe and his jaw.

  
Tilda Mason-Griggsby, the director of the theatrical society (though she wished she directed much more than this, going by her commanding nature), called us up one at a time; I daydreamed about Holmes, his violin, and—sure enough, I knew now, his body—as I waited.

  
I had been living with that memory long enough to recognize it as the beginnings of a small crush. A crush I was doing everything in my living power to put aside. Except—tonight would certainly rank as a setback in my attempts.

  
“Miss Mary Russell?” Tilda Mason-Griggsby finally called. She looked around at the crowd of us, her eyes passing right over me several times. “I don’t see her,” she murmured, and glanced back down at her list. I stood up, and she dropped the list.

I strode onto the stage. All eyes in the entire place were on me.

  
I wore men’s trousers—in truth, they were Holmes’s own trousers, a pair that he had discarded due to an ink stain but that Mrs. Hudson had hemmed the inch or two needed to make up for the slight discrepancy in our leg length, and taken in at the waist. I wore a white shirt, my small breasts not very noticeable under a tweed jacket—also Holmes’ cast-off, this one given up because, quite frankly, I had stolen it from him one chilly night when we’d been walking on the Downs and discussing a previous case he’d solved, and he hadn’t asked for it back. It still smelled of him. I wore my own brogues, but the hat, too, was his—left in my Morris during a drive into the village one day, and not retrieved. My hair was tucked neatly up into the hat, completing the picture. I’d even scrounged up one of his old pipes. I tucked it between my teeth. Never mind that he’d long since switched from pipes to cigarettes.

  
“My mind," I began, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants.” I pulled out an empty vial from my jacket pocket, signifying cocaine. “But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.” I quoted Uncle John’s words flawlessly, emulating the very posture and accent with which my Holmes would have said these words, I knew without having been in the room at the time. I put on his exact air, plus a tinge more of youth and arrogance, a little less of the wisdom and gentle confidence I now knew had replaced them. I was, to be sure, a perfect replica of the Great Detective himself.

  
“Ah. Yes. Thank you,” Tilda Mason-Griggsby said, dismissing me at the end of my monologue. I sat back down. “I think we were going for someone a little more—well, male,” she whispered to Timothy Jenkins, who sat next to her.

  
“I don’t think it’s a problem at all,” he replied. “Shakespeare’s women were always played by men, after all. And she did a wonderful job, really, smashing.” His whisper was much louder than Tilda’s, ensuring that while I had to strain to hear her, I was almost deafened by him.

  
“And yet—her costume was all wrong. Where was the deerstalker cap? And her suit was all wrong.”

  
“I say, Tilda, it’s not as if he were real. I thought she took very reasonable and creative liberties with the costume.”

  
“They were still liberties,” Tilda sniffed. “Sherlock Holmes would never be caught dead in clothes like that, real or no. And anyway, a girl wearing trousers… it’s not to be borne.”

I didn’t get the role.

  
Later, I replaced the trousers with a skirt, and took myself to the local to drown my sorrows in a pint of ale. The Knotted Oak accepted coeds as paying customers, unlike many of the pubs in the area, and was doing a pretty bustling business that night as I sat in my snug, pint in hand and reading a recently published book of Talmudic scholarship. A knock on the table a few minutes into my book alerted me to the presence of another.

  
It was Timothy Jenkins, still clad in full Holmes regalia.

“Mary Russell, right?” he asked.

  
“Yes. And you’re Timothy? You did a fine job at the audition today. And as Gloucester in King Lear last year.”

  
He blushed bashfully. “No, really—I fumbled half my lines. But it was great fun. You, today, though—you were a vision. Tilda should have cast you as the detective.”

  
“I’m sure she had her reasons,” I sniffed, sipping my beer. “Did you get a part?”

  
“Menacing London Thug Number Two, I’m afraid. Some cad with no acting skills but a more expensive get-up beat me to the real prize. I think Tilda’s hoping he’ll make a pass at her if she gives him a good part. His pater owns half of Yorkshire, apparently.”

  
“Ah.” I glanced at the booth, empty but for me, my book, and my minor woes. “Join me?”

  
Timothy and I passed a nice evening of conversation, and I warmed up to him considerably with a second pint. He was on his third when the barman started trying to shoo everyone out for closing. We gathered our things and stepped out into the chilly autumn evening.

  
“Say,” he said, shy. “You wouldn’t want to come back to my place with me, would you?” he attempted. “Only, I’d like very much to go over my new lines, and I’d feel awfully silly doing it alone. There’s no one back at mine, you see, for the lads are all off at the Hon. Tuffy Smithson’s hunting weekend do, but I stayed behind for the audition.”  
I looked frankly down at Timothy (he was about two inches shorter than me). I raised my eyebrows at him, quizzically. I knew what he was really asking. But he looked so innocent that it took me a moment to realize it.

  
“And you really think that I would be a good person to help you read your lines?” I asked him boldly, emphasizing the last three words a little sarcastically. The beer had made me blunt.

  
He looked up at me, and a little shy smile appeared on his face. “If you’d like. Nothing would be expected of you, of course. If you decided you didn’t like…the part…or the dialogue…you could, you know, leave at any time. No hard feelings.”

  
I took stock of the situation. I was not a complete innocent, as I had been last summer—I had seen, now, three men fully or partially nude, the first being Sherlock Holmes from a distance, and the second, Jim Brantley, a homosexual boy whom I had befriended in a religious studies lecture and who had taken me under his wing, educating me on a lot of things I was relatively unapprised of in the world of men. We had gone swimming in the nude together after a long drive in the country at the start of term, drying off in a private copse atop some flannel sheets before we got dressed again, drinking strawberry wine, and giggling over the Oscar Wilde books I’d brought with me.

  
Ernest Addison, the third nude man I’d seen, was the fourth member of a double-dating scenario I rather regretted, but which had left me with my first experience that could be truly termed as sexual. He’d coaxed me away from the two lovebirds, my friend Millicent and her beau Scotty, acting as Scotty’s second and seducing me so that Millicent and Scotty could consummate their passion in a wooded area well-known as a prime location for such things. We’d gone back to the car we’d arrived in, ostensibly to provide a lookout, but really so that he could convince me to kiss him, and then to touch his member until he’d spent himself up into the fabric of his shirt. It hadn’t taken much convincing, to be sure—after my conversations with Jim, and my continued memories of Holmes, I had had to admit that I was curious. And the feeling of him in my hand was quite intoxicating—the control I’d felt, the need I’d drawn out of him. But it was not a very romantic experience, all things considered. As soon as the other two had reemerged from the forest, disheveled and satisfied-looking, we’d driven back to the medieval beauty that was Oxford, Millicent about to burst with newfound knowledge she longed to gossip to me. Ernest had offered to take me out the next weekend, but I’d had to cancel because of a slight cold, and the following weekend he had to travel to Town, and eventually the whole thing was forgotten.

  
Timothy looked at me wistfully, waiting for my answer.

  
“Sure,” I said. And I committed to following him back to his flat.

  
It was a large flat, boyish in its décor and redolent of a moneyed, carefree crew. Timothy had grown a little nervous. As we stepped inside and he closed the door behind him, I asked to use the facilities before we began our evening. I stared at my reflection in the mirror as I washed up, and realized that I was still wearing Holmes’ jacket and cap. I felt the big lump of his pipe in the front pocket against my breast. I gave my reflection a wry grin. “Education never ends, Watson,” I whispered to myself, drying my hands.

  
As I emerged from the loo, I saw that Timothy was engaged with removing his boots. Then, he started to take off his hat, but I said, “Wait.”

  
He looked up at me.

  
“You can leave it on.”

  
“Mary—I’m sorry—do you need for me to walk you home? I can—“

  
“No, I meant—it’s alright if you stay clothed, mostly, is all. I’ll still—I’ll still stay.”

  
He glanced down at his tweedy late-Victorian ensemble and touched his hat, probably feeling, and certainly looking, as if he’d just arisen from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes short story illustrated by Sydney Padget. He was a bright enough boy; his look of surprise quickly evolved into a good-natured leer.

  
“So. The Great Detective, eh?”

  
I pursed my lips and put a hand on my hip. “I won’t go all the way, Timothy. Let’s get that out of the way right now.”

  
“I detect, though,” he flirted, stepping closer towards me and warming up to the prospect of our evening, some of his nervousness evaporating, “that you’d like to go pretty far, wouldn’t you?”

  
“I don’t—I think—well, I suppose, yes.”

  
He tapped himself on the temple. “Elementary.”

  
I snorted. But something in me melted a little. I looked down at the ground. I could still smell Holmes’ scent on the jacket, the cap.

  
I shrugged the cap and jacket off, and they landed on the floor with a soft plopping sound. I shrugged my feet out of my brogues. Timothy closed the distance between us and leaned in for a kiss. I obliged. He pushed at me a little, murmured the word “bedroom” against my mouth, and waltzed me backwards until my back touched a door. He fumbled with the handle, and we fell, me backward, him forward, into his room. It was small and ruthlessly Oxbridgian, a pile of books obscuring the desk and an amateur punting trophy in pride of place in an alcove cut into the wall above it. A wardrobe full of woolen trousers and Irish jumpers stood, the door ajar to display its treasures. A twin bed stood against the far wall. He lay down it, making room for me to perch halfway on top of him.

  
I reached into his trousers—I knew, comfortably, one reliable way of pleasing a man, and I intended to show him that I wasn’t entirely inexperienced. He asked me very deferentially if I would use my mouth to please him, which I thought about and then acquiesced to. It was not unpleasant, all things considered—I didn’t love him, being the “all things” that needed to be considered, I thought. But, like my first sexual experience, it was a powerful feeling. His release, complete and vocal and impassioned, gave me a feeling of gratification—I had learned, for all intents and purposes, a new skill—and I was nothing if not a scholar. And then, he said, it was my turn. Ah, so he was more decorous than Ernest.

  
I wasn’t sure how this would go—I’d only ever pleased myself. Would it be necessary for me to pretend at pleasure I didn’t feel in order to gratify his ego? Girlfriends of mine had explained that this was sometimes the thing to do. But there was something about Timothy—so serious, so gentle, and—I couldn’t deny—his completely inauthentic Holmes costume that was not unrelated to my arousal—that made me believe it may not be necessary. He hoisted up my skirts and began to search for the place between my legs that I would most like to be touched. My body surprised me—I was quite receptive. I closed my eyes. I placed my hands against his thin tweed-covered shoulders. His mouth moved gently against my throat. He hadn’t closed up his trousers, and his member, still at half-mast, lay against my bare thigh. His deerstalker hat slipped off of his head and fell onto my face at one point, and I grasped it and held onto it. He put a finger inside me, slowly, giving me time to say no, which I didn’t, his thumb working against my clitoris. I was close—I could feel my release nearing. He was quiet, apart from his breath—we both were. I conjured an image of a bare arse, and strong and broad shoulders; a bare chest, water from the Channel trickling down into the dark hair. I imagined the trajectory of that water droplet—down and down and down. I knew what an aroused cock looked like now, good and proper—imagined what Holmes’ might look like. I thought of his hands—such lovely, long fingers—calloused but still soft, I knew from the countless times I’d brushed against them. His hands. What would they feel like? And if I could please him, the most unpleasable of men—if I could only-- Oh G-d. Oh dearest G-d.

  
“That was fantastic, Mary,” Timothy said, smiling. He knew I’d finished—had no doubt that he had facilitated it, feeling my spasms and quiverings against his hand. He’d wiped his hand off against his shirt when he’d finished and rolled over to lie next to me. I stared at the ceiling, wondering if he felt as much pride at bringing me pleasure as I’d felt for him. I smiled, too. What strange creatures we are. What a piece of work is man, and woman, too.

“Thanks, Timothy. That really took the sting out of not winning the part, I think,” I observed.

  
“Glad to oblige,” he replied. “Say, if you’d ever like to do this again—I wouldn’t say no. You can send me a line—you know my address now.”

  
“Maybe,” I replied cryptically. I doubted that either of us would actually call on the other again. It had been pleasant and friendly, a nice way to relieve the disappointment of the day. But that was the end of it. I felt a little more grown, and a little more knowledgeable, and both of us had reached satisfaction. And I had learned a few things about myself that would be worth turning over in my head once I got home that night. “Better call a cab for now, though. Long day tomorrow.”

  
“See you ‘round Bodley, maybe!” he called as I stepped outside and waved to him, hopping into the cab that waited for me. “Ditto,” I replied.

  
Just before stepping outside, I’d realized that I had almost forgotten the jacket and cap. Now, sitting in the cab and wearing both, I gave the cabbie directions, took off the cap, and held it against my nose.

  
Holmes.

  
Would I ever be able to shake him?


End file.
